I ordered a pack of the 'Dan Cong Aria' from Adagio... it's easy to forget that there's actually a website behind this forum that sells tea. It is reputed to be grown without pesticides, and it's small-scale farming, so I'm hoping it will be good.

Are you more interested in teas grown without chemical fertilizers / pesticides, or are you concerned about organic certification?

Organic certification is hard for many small farmers to obtain, and in China, many of the organic standards are not that trustworthy anyway. I would suggest ordering from vendors who have good quality dancong from good farmers. Most of them should be able to give you some idea about the farming practices involved. You will never have 100% confidence, but I would go for this method over insisting on certification that it's organically grown.

Bakkoi wrote:Well, there's no way I can afford that. Any other vendor suggestions?

I ordered a pack of the 'Dan Cong Aria' from Adagio... it's easy to forget that there's actually a website behind this forum that sells tea. It is reputed to be grown without pesticides, and it's small-scale farming, so I'm hoping it will be good.

Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too - you're not likely to find cheap dancong with organic labeling for low amounts of money.

Are you more interested in teas grown without chemical fertilizers / pesticides, or are you concerned about organic certification?

Organic certification is hard for many small farmers to obtain, and in China, many of the organic standards are not that trustworthy anyway. I would suggest ordering from vendors who have good quality dancong from good farmers. Most of them should be able to give you some idea about the farming practices involved. You will never have 100% confidence, but I would go for this method over insisting on certification that it's organically grown.

I can appreciate that.

I just want no-pesticide tea. I do not have any confidence in Chinese organic certifications either, and it's hard to imagine a Dan Cong farmer getting a European or Japanese certification, even if they could afford it.

Problem is that a lot of vendors don't go into the tea fields and will eventually have to trust their suppliers, and so they can end up selling false organic tea without knowing it.

If you want to be 100% sure, you'll have to rely on someone who goes on location, deals directly with farmers if possible with no middleman involved, see the way trees are being taken care of, etc. One can spot the use of fertilizer/pesticide when seeing the trees and tasting the tea.

Organic culture, whether it is labelled or not, will lead to lesser quantity for hopefully better quality leading to higher prices. But in the end, the outcome is so much better...

Aside from Hojo and Postcard, I guess Imen from Teahabitat is a reliable source. You can ask her directly, she is very friendly !

longhappy wrote:I think the moss better than organic certificate [...] If the tea farmer have sprinkled pesticide. The tea tree can't see the moss.

Yes, but there's no way to know for sure that the tea you're buying (from any merchant) is actually from the trees pictured on their website. Even if the merchant has personally visited the area where the tea is grown and met the farmer, unless they're watching the tea every second from picking until it's handed over, they can't know for sure that it hasn't been switched for plantation tea (of course, some common sense and knowledge about tea helps).

So again for buyers, it really comes down to trusting your vendor, and (depending on how close to the source they are), trusting your vendor's vendor.

Bug bites are always a good sign, though their absence doesn't necessarily mean pesticides were used, and their presence doesn't mean that they weren't used.